


cracking (you) up and breaking (you) in

by trees_so_thin



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Chaos!Fitzroy, Gen, dodgeball - Freeform, im not tagging the other characters that are there for like 2 lines, l dont know man, maplekeene is implied because i dont know how to not imply it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:35:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26529844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trees_so_thin/pseuds/trees_so_thin
Summary: dodgeball! pain! fledgling chaos fitzroy! hardly any dialogue! you know whats up
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	cracking (you) up and breaking (you) in

**Author's Note:**

> idk bro i just think about him sometimes. still trying to write how it works properly. this works pretty okay i think. one day ill write something with the same premise again huh. also yeah they can have a microwave. if they have whatever fancy crepe machines in canon they can have a microwave. also shout out to rowen for chaos fitz brain food the other day i stole some

It’s a lot like the first time, that first human shield game on one of his first days. Similar in many ways. The field is the same, the glare of the setting sun in his eyes, the teammates and opposing team. The same teachers, the same gym clothes, the same dodgeballs, red and worn, sticky under his fingertips.  
It's also different to that first time.  
This time, the teams are different. Fitzroy is the one throwing. He’s the one being “protected.”  
He’s not entirely comfortable with that. And there’s an uncomfortable itch in the back of his brain telling him to stop playing the coward.  
Whoosh.  
Thud.  
The ball goes sailing past his head, clipping a few stray hairs sticking out the side of his ponytail, as the Firbolg, playing the guard for him this time round, punches the ball effortlessly out of the way. Fitzroy makes an effort to shake himself back to the present and scrambles after the ball to return the serve.  
It's a mindless task, the catch and return, and he feels like he’s definitely taken enough real-world beatings for this training drill to not even be necessary at this point. Well, he knows it's mainly for the sidekick and henches’ benefits; but he isn’t altogether happy with either his sidekick [Argo] being loaned out to another for the task, or with them using themselves as living shields for him in the first place. Mainly because they would probably fuck it up in the field if they tried, and also because he doesn’t need them put in danger directed for him. As far as he knows, the most dangerous forces are always directed towards Fitzroy, and not anyone else.  
He doesn’t even know if they could withstand the kinds of blows that might be meant for him.  
Fitzroy readies the ball, letting a small amount of electricity wrap around his hand, making doubly sure that the magic is contained. He doesn’t want this to end up like last time. Not again.  
He winds up, picking his target. His eyes make a beeline for Rhodes, standing idle as Argo paces in front of her, not obviously looking for the next shot; but Fitzroy can see his eyes darting around, scanning for threats.  
He isn’t sure why he picked the person Argo was guarding out of everyone. He also doesn’t think about the possible ramifications of catching Argo with a lightning based attack.  
Anyway.  
Fitzroy lets the ball loose, allowing the tangible line of magic electricity unfurl from his wrist and guide the ball as it wraps around it. The ball deviates from the trajectory it initially takes and curves around massively towards Rhodes and Argo, something that Rhodes is slow to notice but Argo manages to catch. He whips around at the last moment, kicking Rhodes out of the way with his trailing foot, and deftly uses Shape Water to lift a good amount of water out of the nearby pond, throw it towards the ball, and capture it in midair. Its momentum stopped, the dodgeball hangs suspended in the water for a moment. It then neatly breaks the surface tension and drops to the ground with a thud, rolling towards Argo, who stops it with his foot.  
He looks up at Fitzroy and grins widely while flipping him off.  
Fitzroy forces a friendly chuckle back, but a pit of rage yawns in the middle of his chest for some unfathomable reason. Not the same as when he rages out in battle, but a deep anger at having his attack stopped.  
He can’t work out what that is about.

The match goes on, teams being picked off excruciatingly slowly, the speed almost as painful as Fitzroy’s muscle aches by the time he gets down to the final two competitors.  
The sun is right in his eyes now, just peeking over the horizon of the Unknown Forest, strong and orange, tinting the sky above it golden and pink.  
The dirt of the training ground is scuffed and dug up in places by people’s heels and hands and pratfalls, and a sticky, humid wind whips across it, blowing fine particles into the eyes of everyone present.  
Fitzroy doesn’t feel the dust. All he can focus on is the immense anger in his gut, the throb of his tensed calves, and the intense burning sensation down one side of his face that feels as if he’s rubbed some skin raw. He’s not sure what that’s from because he can’t stop and check, but he did fall all the way over on his face earlier trying to dodge out of the way, so he assumes that’s what it is.  
The Firbolg stands in front of him still, panting and worn, his mountainous mass a welcome shade from the piercing sun. Fitzroy can see how exhausted the big guy is getting. He needs to get this over with. He wants to get this over with.  
He’s getting pissed off.  
The last team standing is Buckminster and Leon, and while they don’t have much in terms of sneaky magic to turn the tides of the game, they apparently have incredible stamina, Leon not even breaking a sweat as he blocks and deflects. Fitzroy puts this down to them not being targeted much in the early stages, and thus getting to keep their energy reserves, but the bigger man’s strength does seem uncannily never-ending.  
Whoosh.  
Thud.  
Again.  
He’s drenched with sweat now, breathing heavily, skin dry and cracked from the constant dust whipping around him, hair falling out of its tie and into his eyes, cheek burning more than ever. Fitzroy thinks he can smell blood. But he’s not game enough to stop and check.  
They’ve introduced two balls at once, and he has to keep on his toes.  
The Firbolg is barely moving anymore.  
This is Fitzroy’s last chance.  
He hesitates before throwing the ball back over, and fakes Leon out by pretending to throw it, causing the bald man to react quickly and throw his ball in retaliation, which Fitzroy grabs out of midair with Mage Hand.  
The anger inside him spikes one final time, and this time it’s fatal.  
Once again, the magic inside Fitzroy lets loose, and a powerful wave of thunder sweeps the field, crackling and booming, hitting everyone within close range.  
A tree falls in the distance.  
Leon falls backwards into the dust, while Buckminster manages to stand his ground, coughing into his elbow and yelling something that Fitzroy can’t hear over the echoing burst of the Thunderwave and the rush of blood in his ears.  
Distantly, he registers the Firbolg collapsing to his knees, and then, his stomach, but the wind underneath him and the static in the air around him is altogether too overwhelming and Fitzroy loses all sense of reality for a short moment.  
Well, it seems short to everyone around him.  


Fitzroy tries to count the seconds he spends in this blank, white space, but the meaning of the numbers slips away from him.  
He sits up.  
It’s like a void, but a flat, meaningless, pure white expanse, stretching on as far as he can see, its utter nothingness making his eyes and mind hurt. Confused, Fitzroy puts a hand up to his head, and panics even more when he can’t actually feel himself.  
His hand brushes right through where he assumes his head would be, and he doesn’t feel anything at all. He looks down and tries to touch his own leg, but.  
But.  
There’s nothing there.  
Now Fitzroy feels the familiar grip of fear at his chest, a squeeze that feels like it’s going to burst his organs right out of his ribcage. Why can’t he see his legs? Why can’t he see his hand in front of his face? If he isn’t there, how is he here? How can he feel his arm raising but not see it?  
Why is everything so goddamn white?  
……..is that a spot of blood on the floor?  
He hears a whisper on the edge of his mind, grating and smooth simultaneously, wrapping itself around the borders of where he can consciously think. It makes him shiver, and nausea rises in the back of his throat.  
It’s whispering his name.  
But it doesn’t feel like his name.  
Not anymore.  
Not like that.

“......roy. Fitzroy. Fitzroy!”  
Dying light filters in through his eyelashes, and Fitzroy recognises himself back on the solid, wrecked ground of the training field, and instantly feels pain and fatigue slam back into him. He raises a hand, relaxing when he confirms he can actually see it in front of him, as grimy and battered as it is.  
….what are those cracks in his skin? Why do those veins pop out so colourfully?  
Marie, the school nurse, is leaning over him, her silver hair shining with the last rays of sunshine as she busies herself. Once confirming that he’s conscious, she goes about her way to clean him up, amassing a large pile of bloodied wet wipes.  
Why is there so much blood? What did I do?  
….is everyone else okay?  
He manages to croak out that last question, dry and raspy as his throat may be. He strains to hear through his ringing ears, but gathers that nobody was hurt especially badly. It was mostly shock, and anything else was minor enough for Marie to be able to fix it magically without much fuss.  
Fitzroy is relieved to hear that, though he suspects he’ll have to deal with a major talking to again, perhaps worse this time, seeing as he’s technically supposed to have improved his skills to the point where he DOESN’T lose control anymore.  
Despite his pain and his paranoia, Fitzroy feels utterly wiped, and his eyelids are so, so heavy. Too heavy to fight keeping them open.  
He closes his eyes and passes out again.  


When he wakes up, he’s laid out on the couch in the common area of their dorm room, head propped up on two pillows, blanket seemingly from Argo’s bed covering his legs, a just-warm mug of tea on the floor waiting.  
He moves to pick the mug up and finds himself stiff and sore, arms bandaged up and sticky with ointments and creams, and full of sharp, lancing pains like a papercut amplified ten thousandfold. Regardless of the effort it takes, he manages to raise the tea to his face and take a sip. It’s too lukewarm and over-steeped, and overall just not good, but his throat is so dry that he drinks it anyway.  
And perhaps, he’s just a little grateful that anyone even thought to leave him something.  
He wonders where Argo and the Firbolg are. Are they at home too? Are they okay?  
With a cresting wave of panic, he remembered the Firbolg’s state at the end of the drill, and also the pain Argo was in the LAST time he got hit by a Thunderwave; and goes to leap out of his makeshift bed to go and find them. His legs cramp as soon as he tries to move them, though, and the half elf falls back on the pillows in pain, kicking and writhing in an attempt to shake the cramp out of his calves.  
It’s then that he hits himself in the face and feels the extent of the graze for the first time.  
He had assumed it would only be a small gravel scrape, nothing too wild, easy to heal with a cleric’s help, not too garish on his visage as it healed.  
But what he feels is…….different.  
The flesh of his cheek feels smooth, and cool; but it doesn’t feel like skin. And it doesn’t feel scraped up, until- there it is, the edge of the smoothness. Now he can feel the ragged tears, painful and raised, shredded beyond classification as skin.  
...But then what’s with the smooth patch?  
He feels around a little more, coming to the conclusion that it felt oddly like just- just flesh. Like the skin had ripped off in one big, intact sheet in that spot, and left his flesh raw and presenting itself to the air. But while the overall texture was certainly akin to raw meat, it didn’t FEEL sticky or raw on the surface.  
Just……..cold, and smooth.  
He wants to get up and visually inspect whatever worrying new physical development he’d acquired in the last 3 hours, but the pangs of the cramps lingering in his legs are still warning him off trying to stand.  
He still wants to know if Argo and the Firbolg are home, though.  
Fitzroy calls out into the dead air of the dorm, flinching at how rough his voice is in his throat.  
There’s no answer, and Fitzroy finally realises just how dark it is in the room, and how all the lights are off and curtains are closed.  
It must be pretty late.  
There's rustling from a room beyond the main one, and his ears prick up as footsteps tap on the floorboards. Argo emerges sleepily from his room, hair messy, barely clothed; but his teeth flash in the darkness in the dim light from the kitchenette microwave’s clock, and Fitzroy gathers that he’s smiling.  
The next moments are in darkness, but then Fitzroy feels Argo’s arms around him, and it hurts but he leans into the hug, glad for some comfort through his pain.  
“Are ya doin’ okay?” Argo asks quietly, his expression barely readable in the gloom. Fitzroy wonders what he looks like right now. It must be bad. He can see Argo frowning.  
“I- it’s- it’s tolerable. I’m fine. It’s fine. Okay.“  
He doesn’t want to talk too much; not only does his throat feel sore and scratchy, but the way it makes his voice come out is odd and turbulent, and he doesn’t like the way his words are curling at the ends and twisting out of his vocal cords all snakelike. It sounds familiar, but it doesn't sound right. He’s not sure a person should make those sounds.  
It hits him as he lays back down and Argo quietly makes him a fresh cup of tea in the darkness.  
He sounds like them.  
Chaos.

When Fitzroy manages to vacate his bedrest and has the courage to look in a mirror, he sees more parallels.  
The smooth patch he felt before is certainly a plain of exposed flesh, but it’s not flesh coloured. Instead, it shimmers with an iridescent quality over a white base, and it looks as smooth and stone-like as it feels.  
Now that he’s noticed it, he finds more and more little patches like this, mostly marring his shoulders and hips, places where bone is close to the skin. There’s other small cracks and patterns radiating out from them too, all showing that same iridescence peeking through.  
It just gets worse as he gets better.  
Eventually Fitzroy starts to see himself change. It’s small at first, but after a while, it becomes too much to ignore. Looking from the outside, anyone might guess he was simply sick or losing weight, but he hasn’t lost any muscle mass at all.  
He can tell it's his actual BONES changing their structure slightly.  
His cheekbones are set deeper, making him look gaunt, and all the bony angles of his body feel more prominent. He carries himself different when he walks, and when he talks, and when he stands.  
His voice never comes back.  
If anything, it gets smoother, silkier, more skin-crawling. Nobody comments on it because they know it’ll upset him to have any of these physical changes acknowledged, but Fitzroy sees them thinking it.  
He sounds…..malicious.  
He doesn’t mean to. He doesn’t WANT to.  
But they’ve got him by the balls right now, it seems.  
And he keeps changing.  
The veins on his hands and arms are more visible now, taking on the same hue as his flesh, but deeper, and he starts to wear long sleeves as much as he can so he doesn’t have to look at it. He starts to find little scars and blisters all over his body. His skin becomes pale, and thin, and desperately sensitive to almost everything it comes in contact with, while his hair turns whiter, and thinner, and sheds.  
Fitzroy is utterly miserable.  
But his grin is wider than ever. 

One day he just doesn’t wake up.  
Not in that way, but it feels like it for a second.  
He WAKES up, but he’s not in.  
It’s happened a few times this week; he’ll be walking somewhere or saying something and boom he’s gone, out of his body, back in that white space, seeing echoes of himself like seeing a mirror out the corner of your eye down a hallway, watching himself move but not in a way that he would do, hearing himself speak but not with any of his speech patterns, feeling phantom echoes of his limbs but not actually moving anything.  
He hates it, and it’s scary, but he’s always forced back in and regained control over himself in the end.  
But today, he wakes up, and he's not in his body.  
The panic is so strong that he would be throwing his guts up if he had any physicality to his form, and the inability to grip his wrist, feel his pulse and calm down only serves to spike the attack further. Fitzroy feels helpless, and so, so powerfully overcome by panic that he thinks he’s going to die right here, in this hole of nothingness, attached to nobody and carrying no weight at all.  
Then he blinks, and he’s back in. Sort of.  
He can feel his body, but slightly to the left; he’s there but not quite, overlaid just so that his consciousness is on the very edge of his form, not enough teeth to grip into it and pilot it properly.  
He watches his limbs move independently of his will, and isn't sure whether this is more or less distressing than being in that white void.  
It’s something he has to get used to.

Eventually he gets in touch with how this new setup works, and registers how it’s being NOT in control that allows him to control himself, in a way.  
If he lets go and doesn’t think about it, he can manage to feel himself back fully inside his brain, and function normally, but if he lets himself think rationally about doing anything, he’s pushed back out of the fringes of his mind again, and left helpless once more.  
While this discovery does wonders for Fitzroy to be able to go about his day as normally as possible, the condition of him needing to not think about anything he does turns him into a bit of a danger to be around. He’s regularly violent and impulsive, and he can see the fear in people’s eyes, especially those close to him.  
It’s something he has to ignore.  
He doesn’t let people touch him much anymore.  
Months pass, and he sits out a season, cold and separate from others, sad and alone.

He sits the next round of training drills out, because he can feel that he won’t be able to stop himself and he’ll end up seriously hurting someone this time. It’s difficult to do, because he knows that he’ll slip out of control and go anyway if he deliberately tries to stay at home, so he makes the Firbolg lock him in overnight, and tries to meditate the day away when he wakes up.  
He can feel the bright red flashes in the back of his mental room, and ignores the headache it gives him.  
He may be on the cusp, but he doesn’t want to give in to them completely just yet.  
He can’t do that. He still has responsibility.  
He needs to keep himself and his friends safe, and win.  
He needs to win the war.  
He wants to be completely conscious of himself when he does it.

Fitzroy drags a hand down his face, and feels the skin peel away.  
The door finally unlocks, and he feels his mind peel away too.

The room is white. 

“Your time’s up, Fitzroy.  
No  
More  
Running 

Or trying to be in control.

You're out of the driver’s seat.”

He stares up at Chaos, and they offer him one final grin, mirroring the one he can feel spreading across his own, as he turns to face the Firbolg, peering in as he undoes all the locks on the other side of Fitzroy’s door.

“Master Firbolg, I think it’s time we finally let loose.”  
The Firbolg looks at him quizzically, and almost instantly clocks that Fitzroy is absolutely gone.

Fitzroy smiles, and their teeth glint menacingly in the backlight of the setting sun.

“Time for war.”


End file.
